Abe Foxman said something very smart the other day. There is a “continuous crisis” between American Jews and Israeli Jews over fundamental value differences, from occupation to freedom of worship, he said. Does that mean there is a “divorce” between the communities? No, said the former head of the Anti Defamation League said.
No I don’t think there’s a divorce. As long as Israel is under threat, as long as Israel is not secure, there’s not a divorce. Halevai [would that it were so] we come to the day when there is peace– and if there is peace– that’s when you are going to deal with the issue of divorce.
The idea that Israel needs conflict in order to bind American Jews to it ties in with something the Israeli centrist politician Yair Lapid said at the same security conference at which Foxman spoke: Israel is now in a permanent war. “In this new world, in which we live, there is no longer any separation between days of peace and days of war.”
Lapid said that war began in the last decade, with the Arab spring, the economic crisis of 2006, and the social media revolution.
It turns out once again that the Middle East believes in a different way, namely that violence can be an available, reasonable solution for any problem. We have enemies with mentalities of the 11th century holding weapons of the 21st century…. In this new world, in which we live, there is no longer any separation between days of peace and days of war. Faced with this reality, Israel will always need to be powerful and it would have to have a lot of power. And this power can not only be brutal power, it has to be smart power.
This is of course a restatement of the”We live in a dangerous neighborhood” argument, so at times we have to be brutal– which Tom Friedman first explained to American Jews was the state of the Middle East back in the 1980s. And we never stop hearing what a terrible neighborhood Israel lives in.
What Foxman’s statement suggests is that there is something highly functional to this argument: it binds American Jews to Israel. And of course their support is crucial in material ways: ensuring American governmental/political support for Israel by way of the lobby, and funding countless Israeli institutions, from Mike Bloomberg’s hospital clinics to Sheldon Adelson’s Holocaust memorials to Robert Kraft’s Jerusalem football stadium to Jared Kushner’s Israeli settlements. Were it not for that American Jewish support, the GDP of Israel would surely be in the basement, or on the first floor anyway. Not at the level of European countries.
Foxman’s security blackmail touches on an organizing principle of the Israel lobby: the dominance that neoconservatives have over liberals inside the Jewish community. I like to tell the story about how neoconservative Eric Breindel got me to shut up about Israel when I knew him at college 40 years ago. Stay away from this issue, you don’t know enough, he said bluntly; and I did for many years.
There was a sense on both our parts that Breindel as the son of Holocaust survivors had a right to address issues of Jewish security, and I did not.
That was a communal sense. In recent years I’ve heard neoconservatives Michael Makovsky and Bill Kristol issue that same security blackmail in speeches in New York. It is “cavalier,” Kristol said five years ago, for comfortable Americans on the Upper West Side who face no risks at all to “berate” Israel and “second-guess” the ”tough calls” that Israel has had to make.
“I’m not sure I’m capable of judging all these extremely complicated legal and political issues within the state of Israel. I believe that as Americans what we can do… is above all stand with Israel against existential threats, terror threats.”
A few weeks ago, Makovsky issued the same fiat, slamming other members of a panel who were criticizing Israel: “Look, it’s easy to sit here on West 86th street…”
The reason I seize on these two statements, out of hundreds of similar injunctions, is that they epitomize the neoconservative power because they were issued in the same progressive space: the famous B’nai Jeshurun, which is dedicated to openness and tolerance.
These two neocons gain a platform there for a simple reason: because they claim to address an issue of Jewish survival, in the shadow of the Holocaust. The community respects neoconservatives because they are quite literally in touch with the hard generals in uniform who have to do those “brutal” things in that medieval neighborhood. While pencil-necked Jewish liberals in the U.S. who would never let their children don a uniform other than a soccer kit get to work on their screenplays and kombucha cultures and lucrative internet startups– and they must have no standing on these questions. Which is why I’ve never heard an anti-Zionist speak at B’nai Jeshurun. Kristol and Makovsky were both opposed by liberal Zionist Jeremy Ben-Ami, whose father was in the Irgun. You bet he has standing!
It is for the same reason that the Union for Reform Judaism and countless Jewish politicians who came to prominence by opposing the Vietnam war supported the Iraq War: because the neoconservatives in our community said that this war would help Israel. The courageous Jerrold Nadler opposed that war, and he said he was pilloried by demagogues as anti-Israel for his vote.
What Foxman’s epiphany suggests is that the level of manipulation here is more profound and sinister than I could allow myself to imagine: That Israel chooses violence as an “available, reasonable” answer because it binds American Jews to its side, forever. That’s very dark, yes; and I am not given to cynicism, but progressives need to ask themselves: Why does Israel propagate myths of the dangerous neighborhood and the permanent war?
Thanks to Scott Roth and James North.
The middle east is a messed up neighborhood. Israel hasn’t helped, but the problem is deeper.
(With trump as president the trajectory of American leadership in the post WW2 world has been interrupted. At least for the moment the victory of democracy has been put in abeyance. But let us hope that this is a hiccup and not the new future.)
Just been reading some Ben Gurion bio material. Of course, the state was born because of him and the nakba occurred because of him. But if his forward looking spirit had inhabited ehud barak or ehud Olmert or ariel sharon, a two state solution could have been reached.
The upshot is constant war. 45 years ago the threat was the conventional armies of surrounding states: egypt and syria. Today it is the hezbollah missile stockpile threatening havoc. But the headlines are of the suppression of bedouins and internal jewish versus Arab strife and checkpoints on the west bank, and gaza under siege. To my eye this aspect of the conflict is extraneous and symptomatic of myopia, the opposite of farsightedness.
The constant war, according to some, has been enabled by blind American support, due to unthinking American Jewish support.
In American Jewish life there have been three big bangs: the great migration of 1880 to 1920 was the local big bang and far as foreign big bangs there was the shoah and israel.
The immigrant experience is not unique to jews, and sociologists might enlighten with statistics of identity 100 years after the original change of location. The disappearance or decimation of the Jewish subgroup in countries of origin might add some complicating factor. An identity based on religion, despite its ethnic features, will also have unique reactions at a time of secularism particularly modern urban cosmopolitan secularism.
The joy of the settler element in israel to the trump victory, while the majority of jews disdain trump will cost israel when trump will, please God sooner rather than later, be in our rear view mirror. Some moments I wonder how america will survive this curse called trump, but most moments, I assume we, america, will. In which case those associated with trump will bear a stain and bibi and the settlers , with their short term focus, aren’t concerned with 8 or 12 or 32 years hence, they’re not thinking like that.
ben gurion is just as responsible for the mess as anyone. he was the leading proponent of the bible as history homogenizing strategy, which has created the schizophrenia that is the thread that connects the collective israeli mental state. (ooo, that’s a long sentence.) secular jews are just as fervent in their belief of divine right as are the settlers, which is why there is no peace.
PW: “Why does Israel propagate myths of the tough neighborhood and the permanent war?”
Perhaps because it reinforces the superimposed phony “chosen” separation from global humanity and codependent aspects between the diaspora and israelis. This clever tool as myth was created to assure parochial job security, massive powerful influence and insane wealth intended primarily for the benefit of the zios out of touch with the demands of the present day and especially the real priorities of the youngest generation of Jews in both worlds who do not have much in common beyond the outrageous corrupting abuses of a religion-as-enforcer. I hope that the spiritual religious tenets will survive, but without an effort, this last survivor among other regional religions of the Antiquities will very likely fade away into Oblivion: the zios need Jews to survive, Jews do not need the zios and their parasitic controlling tribal terror.
The israeli govt. and their flunky useful idiots, from adelson to aipac, need to maintain this codependency by replaying ad nauseam, e.g., the whines invoking the hecatomb of the mid-20th century that no longer work. Worse, the whines have created a Pavlovian response that tunes out and turns off what belongs in a special and separate uniting space together with other incidents of genocidal savagery and is, instead, used for pedestrian purposes to, inter alia, save the jobs of those whose sole purpose is to separate and keep Jews separated from global humanity and contributing to the revival of old prejudices that until recently, were finally retreating into the dustbin of history.
“And we never stop hearing what a terrible neighborhood Israel lives in.”
That neighbourhood is israel’s only “accomplishment”. Without corrupting israel into a massive ghetto dominated and controlled by the zios, israelis and Arabs would have found common cause by themselves a very long time ago. Who knows, maybe they would also have learned to live without the oppressive tribal terror and become an equal member of the human family: clearly anathema to the zios whose continued existence depends on mumbling the mantra of Jews being “chosen” but without the missing following part: “to being slaves in the service to the white zios” whose existence depends on a society cheated out of learning to stand on their own two feet and to fight back when threatened, especially with extinction. I hope on everything that is sacred that we never again have to see or hear stories about Jews-as-sheep, dutifully submitting to the orders of their genocidal tormentors. And, no, a “tour of duty” in the israeli army does not accomplish that. The “army’s” sole purpose is to keep the unarmed natives in the crosshairs of the “soldiers’ ” weapons, and subject to trigger-happy violence that inevitably touches off desperate reliation that further adds to the ever-widening divide.
I want to believe that the time is coming when Arabs living outside of Palestine will finally get rid of the Ottoman/colonial-learned passivity and respond to the uniting spirit the has brought them into the present: to fight, together with their israeli brothers and sisters, their common and deadly enemy, i.e., their pathocrat slave masters obsessed with Europe, rather than the region where they live. The zios have the title to neither; both want the evil at their door gone.
RE: “As long as Israel is under threat [chuckling], as long as Israel is not secure, there’s not a divorce. Halevai [would that it were so] we come to the day when there is peace– and if there is peace– that’s when you are going to deal with the issue of divorce.” ~ Foxman
CHUCKLE, CHUCKLE, CHUCKLE, SEE: Netanyahu: “We Will Forever Live By The Sword”, Indefinitely Control All Palestinian Territory | By IMEMC News | Oct 27, 2015
SOURCE – http://www.mintpressnews.com/netanyahu-we-will-forever-live-by-the-sword-indefinitely-control-all-palestinian-territory/210700/
P.S. Damn, my throat is dreadfully parched. A nice, cold glass of pink champagne certainly would hit the spot.
Arnon?
Arnon, honey?
Arnoooooooooooon, hell hath no fury like a woman (especially a Queen) deprived of her favorite, premium quality, pink champagne! ! !
I might not be able to testify against my husband, but that doesn’t mean I can’t testify against you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sshjRnoaHU4
‘What Foxman’s epiphany suggests is that the level of manipulation here is more profound and sinister than I could allow myself to imagine: That Israel chooses violence as an “available, reasonable” answer because it binds American Jews to its side, forever. That’s very dark, yes; and I am not given to cynicism, but progressives need to ask themselves: Why does Israel propagate myths of the dangerous neighborhood and and the permanent war?’
I’m so sick of this crap. Makes staring at lint in your navel seem like a good use of your time.